Not sure I agree with all of this — or with Nicholas Carr, for that matter — but a new study from Online College, much of it very obvious, raises good questions about the effect of the interwebs on our brains… (via Ray Kurzweil):
The Internet is our external hard drive
Children are learning differently
We hardly ever give tasks our full attention
We don’t bother to remember
We’re getting better at finding information
Difficult questions make us think about computers
IQ is increasing over time
Our concentration is suffering
We’re getting better at determining relevance
We’re becoming physically addicted to technology
The more you use the Internet, the more it lights up your brain
Our brains constantly seek out incoming information
Gotta gotta gotta love Yayoi Kusama. Always have, always will. My friend Ben Austin's feed reminded me about Kusama's simple yet striking new show at GOMA. Here's an excerpt from thisiscolassal, showing what the installation looked like when she started, and what it looks like after Kusama gave thousands of colored stickers to thousands of kids at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art…
"I do think, at a certain point, you've made enough money," said Obama in 2010.
Well, it's 2012 now, it's hard out there for us pimps, so I didn't much know wtf to say when a financial advisor recently asked me my magic number. "You know," he said, "the number that answers all the questions."
"No fucking idea," I replied.
When someone asked John D. Rockefeller the same question, here's what he said:
In a world where my top five biggest problems include how to get my kid to stop playing his Nintendo DS?
In a world where making a true impact, creating the scale of change I want to see in the world requires getting farther and farther from the people who need help, and closer and closer to the sources of money so I can redirect it to them?
Louis CK learned something about magic numbers last month. And taught himself (and us) something in the process. First, he bypassed the TV networks in favor of his own DIY special on the web. He decided to charge people $5 to watch his show on demand. Lotsa pundits are all over that story, proclaiming it an inflection point on the path of old media's demise. I'll leave that debate to the jokers I'll see this month at CES.
Anyway, Louis CK's phone began lighting up with scores of pays-per-view. When it hit million — yes, a million — bucks, he sat there flabbergasted. Any of us would. But what most of us wouldn't do is what Louis CK did next, and here's that story via Jimmy Fallon:
Like most of us, I take my financial cues from rappers. Like Lil Wayne: "Too much money ain't enough money, you know the feds listenin." (Smart man.)
And Jay-Z: "I'm not a businessman. I'm a business, man." (Smarter man.)
